Elon Musk tunnels under Vegas. This week The Boring Company opened their first operational tunnel under the enormous Las Vegas Convention Center, reducing travel time from one end of the Center to the other from a 45-minute walk to a blazing fast 2-minute ride. And visitors whiz through the tunnel in a fleet of Teslas!

Underground wonder, or underwhelming? The Vegas project, which took 18 months to complete, isn’t the transportation transformation Musk promised when he initially founded The Boring Company, but cities are excited about the possibilities. Musk has plans to build tunnels in Chicago, Baltimore, and Los Angeles and Fort Lauderdale also seems close to a deal. But skeptics are wondering whether Elon’s drilling dreams will be dynamos or duds. 

We know how much rising tech hubs rely on having well-developed transit systems, so we celebrated the opening of the Vegas tunnel this week. A new study by the Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago reported that startups are increasingly choosing cities that have good public transportation options. 

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